She Stays Winning

May 24, 2021 1:54 PM

A genre of “feminist” filmmaking conflates suffering and empowerment.
posted by sapagan (14 comments total)

Amen to all this. I thought it was absolutely crazy that in 2020 we got a rape-revenge movie working from the premise that the patriarchal institutions that comprise America’s idea of a justice system have comprehensively failed to protect women from abuse that nevertheless tacks on an ending in which the protagonist relies on the cops to save the day. It’s no wonder the Academy loved it — grossly simplified takes on intractable social issues are their specialty.
posted by Mothlight at 2:59 PM on May 24, 2021 [13 favorites]

Calling the cops to save the day is also mostly what I hated about the Antebellum movie.

Question, does Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames also fall into this trap? There a lot about a socialist future which fails to undo the patriarchy, but the visible rape culture is countered with solidarity,not cops.
posted by eustatic at 3:42 PM on May 24, 2021

A solution to this dilemma, that American viewers seek violent catharsis, but we find violence distasteful, intellectually, or unstrategic, was found in Lovecraft Country's "Strange Case.".

Ruby is passed over for employment, because the white manager wants to hire a black woman he wants to abuse.

In her normal form, Ruby saves the woman from being raped.

Viewers are shown, and feel, the reality of the manager's violence on Ruby when Ruby, empowered by blood magic, takes her revenge on the manager in the form of a stilleto heel.

This revenge plot really works, I feel, because we also shown, inbetween, Ruby's fantasy of being gainfully employed. So we know exactly what the stakes are, we are shown, and we feel joy in the alternate reality where the manager's misogynoir didn't happen.

So perhaps what the Promising Young Woman needed was 20 minutes of our protagonist fulfilling her promise. Then, because of the loss of her friend, she falls into her state of misery. So that we know and feel the stakes of her suffering.
posted by eustatic at 4:26 PM on May 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

Focus Features announced it was partnering with RAINN, the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the United States, to provide free screenings of the film to college students.

Great article and points. This stood out because it appears to me that RAINN was founded by record companies (Atlantic and Warner) in order to launder patriarchal and misogynistic cultural values with the goodwill generated by their (very valuable and important) volunteer run sexual assault hotline. Their president, Scott Berkowitz, is a PR exec who had no experience with domestic violence prevention when the company was founded.

RAINN (and again I want to distinguish between their consulting/public relations work and their important hotline) drew scrutiny when they advised the Obama administration to stop worrying about ‘rape culture’, which they deemed a distraction from the real problems (individuals who commit rape).

Promising Young Woman seems to follow similar thinking, ‘solving’ complex societal issues by punishing individuals and maintaining control through a police state rather than pushing for any kind of shift in cultural norms.
posted by soy bean at 6:43 PM on May 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

Great article. Here's another critical review/evisceration of Promising Young Woman that I found to be a super interesting read.
posted by thebots at 6:45 PM on May 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

I thought it was a great movie, and that it specifically, and pointedly, showed cops as useless and apathetic until they were forced to care due to murder.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 7:37 PM on May 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

It frustrates me that people take studio-mandated interviews about Promising Young Woman more seriously than the text of the film itself. It's a story about a woman being destroyed by prolonged grief over her best friend. She re-enacts the events leading to her friend's suicide every week. The film depicts this as literal self-crucifixion. When the people responsible for her friend's death intrude into her life, she lashes out in extreme and inappropriate ways. The people she targets are loathsome, but her methods undermine her aims. She ultimately commits suicide-by-rapist.

I find Cassie relatable because I see myself in her. I went through a period where I wrecked my own life in protest of an injustice being visited upon a loved one. It wasn't a good way to live. It certainly wasn't empowering, but I don't think the movie depicts it as empowering.
posted by Ptrin at 9:58 PM on May 24, 2021 [13 favorites]

The original ending to the movie was Cassie's abandoned dead body. The studio refused to release it without a comeuppance for the rapist/murderer and specifically wanted to show the cops doing right by Cassie, so Fennel wrote the most male gaze-y, dissonant, improbable "fuck you" of an ending to satisfy the studio. It's supposed to be about how the authorities never come around to caring, how Cassie's rage and attempts at revenge ruin her own life and don't effect any change, how she's fundamentally powerless and trapped in a world that ignores her. The studio thought that ending -- two women raped, two women dead, nobody cares -- was too dark, and insisted that the cops would magically give a shit after Cassie's death.

So when you watch it, everything after Cassie's body is abandoned is Fennel writing with one hand while her other hand is giving the studio a middle-finger salute, and it's deliberately dissonant, unlikely, and frankly bizarre -- just like the studio's demand that she show a world where those who commit violent acts against women suffer any consequences.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:19 AM on May 25, 2021 [8 favorites]

showed cops as useless and apathetic until they were forced to care due to murder.

Cops in the real world routinely remain apathetic in the face of murder.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:40 AM on May 25, 2021

That makes so much sense Eyebrows. I also liked this movie a lot and find most of the negative reviews to seem to have thought the movie was celebrating something it was not at all celebrating. I found the movie deeply uncomfortable in its portrayal of rape culture, but just as important, her spiraling around the drain seemed so real and self destructive. A horrible and real consequence of our world.

I'm interested to watch the movies that OP rattled off as better treatments of sexual violence: Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2020), Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), and Eva Trobisch’s All is Well (2018).
posted by macrael at 9:42 AM on May 25, 2021

The original ending to the movie was Cassie's abandoned dead body. The studio refused to release it without a comeuppance for the rapist/murderer and specifically wanted to show the cops doing right by Cassie, so Fennel wrote the most male gaze-y, dissonant, improbable "fuck you" of an ending to satisfy the studio.

Do you have a citation for this bit about the ending being Fennell's big middle finger to the studio? That's an interesting take (and I'd kinda love for it to be true) but I've seen multiple interviews with her that seem to contradict each other. For instance, there's the Variety interview that refers to "the first version of the script" that supposedly ends with Cassie's body being burned where she says, “They were, like, ‘Come on, we’re going to give you money to make this!’ But in my heart, I think that’s where it would have ended.”

Refinery29 wrote this, which I think is just them misquoting Fennell:

The first draft of Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell’s glowing, vicious debut feature, ended pretty much how you’d hope it would. After tracking him down to his bachelor party in the woods and posing as a stripper, protagonist Cassie (Carey Mulligan) finally gets revenge on the man who destroyed her best friend. She carves Nina’s into Al’s (Chris Lowell) chest and cuts off his dick, leaving him handcuffed to the bed. It’s a satisfying conclusion to a feminist revenge tale, one that would likely leave the audience with the optimistic notion that women might have a fighting chance of overcoming rape culture.

But then there's this, from Deadline:

According to Fennell, not only was there never any pushback about the pic’s ending from the producers around her or studio executives, but she never had any alternatives in place in regards to Cassie’s ultimate fate.

“I don’t draft, I write it all in my head,” Fennell tells us about her screenwriting process, “By the time it’s done, it’s pretty much done.”

“There is no such draft,” says the filmmaker about whether there was a Plan B for Promising Young Woman's ending.

“The first draft I wrote down, it was complete.”

Inconclusive, but I haven't seen anything that suggests the studio demanded she show a response from the cops. If it really is a rewritten ending with a go-fuck-yourselves story behind it, I'd love to hear more about it!
posted by Mothlight at 12:49 PM on May 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Variety:

The first version of the script ended with Al and Joe burning Cassie’s body. In other words, bleak as hell! Fennell’s financiers balked, she said with a laugh: “They were, like, ‘Come on, we’re going to give you money to make this!’ But in my heart, I think that’s where it would have ended.”

When she originally sat down to write the script, Fennell had yet another ending in mind — one in which Cassie walks into Al’s bachelor party and triumphs — “the big, fuck you, cathartic ending,” she said, in which Cassie “is going to put on a sexy outfit and she’s going to kill a ton of guys!”

“It was never written,” she continued, “because the moment Cassie is in that room, I realized that there is no way of honestly showing that. Because it’s not true. And it was important to me to play out as realistically as I could, what this would look like.”

Indeed, Fennell realized that the fuck-you revenge ending was physically impossible: “I cannot imagine being in a room with a man and threatening him where it plays out in any different way — no matter how much we want it to be the case.”

posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:26 PM on May 26, 2021

That does seem to contradict the Deadline interview from two months later, though.
posted by sagc at 7:43 PM on May 26, 2021

Yeah, I did read that one. I totally believe that the studio told her the ending couldn’t be a complete bummer. (That’s what studios do!) I’m more curious where you read that “the studio … specifically wanted to show the cops doing right by Cassie” because I haven’t seen an interview where she talks about this in any more detail and that would definitely change the way I think about the film! I mean, if it ends when the body is buried, that’s a much tougher and more despairing film.

If anyone reading this has a strong stomach and wants to see a really tough rape-revenge film, Violation is literally stunning. (I saw the live-streamed Sundance premiere but it took me a while to process it.) It’s feminist and very empathetic and wise about trauma but also just as harrowing as it could possibly be (and not in the ways you might expect).
posted by Mothlight at 11:16 PM on May 26, 2021 [1 favorite]